


this joke has never been funny (but we tell it again and again)

by Previously8



Category: The Penumbra Podcast
Genre: Addiction, Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Friendship, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Past Drug Use, using your support system is a Go, we love Rita
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-26
Updated: 2019-07-26
Packaged: 2020-07-20 00:30:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,236
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19983082
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Previously8/pseuds/Previously8
Summary: The pills on the counter were laughing at him.Or, Juno sometimes gets tips from his clients and not all of them are as much of a treat as they seem. For once, though, this lady manages to deal with issues the right way, and calls a friend.Set ambiguously post s1 finale, pre s2.





	this joke has never been funny (but we tell it again and again)

**Author's Note:**

> Warning: this does contain some relatively graphic descriptions of drug addiction, past drug use, some blood, an anxiety attack, and alcohol. 
> 
> It also contains Rita being the BEST, so it can't be that bad. 
> 
> Hope you enjoy :)

The pills on the counter were laughing at him.

Okay, maybe not actually laughing. That would have been ridiculous, even by Juno’s admittedly low standards. It was probably just the ever-grating voice in his head, the inescapable burning itch in his bones, the scrape of a memory on his mind—but it sure felt like he was being laughed at. 

Number one cosmic joke, that was Juno Steel.

The worst part was that it had been a decent case. It had been real one, not some batty lady with a lost cat, or some kid with a lizard who got stuck on the roof. No, the case had been the good old fashioned is-she-or-isn’t-she-cheating kind, with an added twist or two, but overall as straightforward as anything in Hyperion City. 

The client, one Armageddon Blake (not, Juno realized in retrospect, that that was probably her real name, but hey you meet all kinds), had approached him in his office during opening hours. She had gladly paid half up-front, offered as many possible details as she could about her fiancée’s whereabouts and habits, and had been altogether put-together. It was the kind of case that usually made Juno suspicious with its simplicity.

Turns out he was right to be—one car chase, one firefight, and one tearful apology (Blake’s, not Juno’s, thank you very much), and it actually turned out to be a long-running con, involving far too much emotional bullshit on top of the seduction for Juno’s taste. His bullets had flown far from straight, but they’d done enough. It still left a bitter taste in his mouth, despite the resolution.

But in the end, after all the heart-racing details, the running and the swearing, Juno got paid. In full. And hey, that was all he could really ask for—and more than he expected lately. This shitty dry spell—the nightmares or maybe just echoes—it had been a while since Juno expected anything good. 

He should have been more suspicious, of course, when Blake offered him a “treat” for his services, but at that point, two-days into the case and only just emerging, all Juno really wanted was a shower. He accepted the tip in its bag, whatever it was, and got a cab back, heeding her suggestion to open it at home. 

He made it back to the apartment in one piece, threw the bag on the kitchen counter without opening it and stumbled into his blessed, lovely shower. The shower was enough to melt the last of the tension away, despite the fact that Mister Number Five had left him barely any hot water. He could feel the case leave his muscles like a sigh. He had done what he was good at, for once, no one got hurt, and he got paid. He spent longer there, under lukewarm water, than he usually would. 

Juno didn’t even think to open the small bag with Blake’s treat until he stepped out and noticed it on the counter again, his brain finally catching up to the events of the evening. His wary instincts kicked in—it could just as well be a letter bomb as a chocolate gateau, knowing the way people in Hyperion City tended to live their lives. Or, how Hyperion City tended to treat its citizens, anyway. He nudged it with the end of an empty wine bottle that had been on his counter for too long. Nothing happened. 

Fuck it, he decided. If it was actually a treat, then all the better. If it wasn’t, well, he’d been having a shitty week up until this point anyway. What the hell. 

It was a simple paper bag, innocent of any indication it held danger. Might have held a kid’s lunch (ha—there was probably an unfunny joke about a Juno of a different era to be said--)

It held something much more sinister.

Well, it didn’t look threatening, for sure. The brown paper bag contained only a smaller, clear bag, about an inch across by two inches tall, which contained three small, white pills no bigger than his smallest fingernail. 

Juno froze, pinching the small bag of pills by the zip top.

Ah yes, the inescapable punchline. 

It wasn’t even that he was surprised. He didn’t have it in him, after the twists and turns of the case, to really feel surprise. No, the feeling, besides nausea, in his gut, was something closer to dread. Or was it longing? 

His stomach had dropped but his bones were singing. 

He knew these pills. Hell, this was better quality shit than most of the stuff he’d got, all fancy with the name actually stamped on them. Back when he— _indulged_ —his pills had mostly come second-hand, one way or another, from some other kid on a street corner, from a guy in a back alley with a taste for any pretty young thing, or from his mother’s stash—though this was far from her drug of choice. Or his. 

The pills, though, well, some called it Sunny or was it Sonny? Juno had never cared, never learned the proper name either, but learned the look and the “S” stamped on top. It didn’t matter what it was called, though. What mattered was the incredible, floating high you got once you’d had one, or two, or a handful. Juno could remember what it was like, his worries melting away, his spine melting with it, better than any warm shower. Back _then_ , three pills would have been nothing; a short trip, escape, dream. Now, he knew, three typical doses could probably kill him. 

Sonny made it so nothing mattered, of course, because things rarely matter when the world is languid and slow. You lose time, stress, worry… It kept you a little too present for Juno’s old tastes, but he knew that the drug companies had started to market it in small doses as a stress-reliever for rich men, the kind with nothing better to do than throw money at pills being sold for twenty times their street cost. Hell, Juno knew he could probably use a little chemical stress relief too. 

He dropped them on the counter, feeling unpleasantly numb.

To anyone else, maybe, this would indeed be a treat. A little escape, nothing more. 

In Juno, it just seemed to awaken a long-buried itch under his skin, a burning in his throat. A familiar feeling, but one that he hadn’t been faced with in years: He’d gotten clean—from everything, though drink was still a vice he allowed himself. It felt like betrayal that he still desired the numbness that came with the high. 

He should have expected this particular treat. The case had been all about layers of deception, of untruth, of misdirection. It was entirely possible that the whole con—not only forgery and heist, but drugs too. Who knew what Blake and her fiancée were actually dealing in. Maybe they were the goddamn owners of the factory that bottled this shit. 

It didn’t matter much now, though, did it. He was here, they were fucking in some hotel room while he faced down some little white demons that hadn’t plagued him in years.

It was worse because it was _so tempting_. On the end of a shitty week, with only one half-decent case (thanks, Ms. Blake), a series of nightmares, and two nights drinking to forget that _cologne_ to show for it—it was maddeningly, excruciatingly tempting to forget—to numb himself to the world, to forget not only pain but the source of it—well. Juno would be hard pressed to name one person who wouldn’t love to lose themselves to a blank slate, at least for a little while.

His head was already doing the math. Knowing how many milligrams—and if each pill was—he could probably take a quarter, no, a half and still be at work on time—

Pain jolted him out of his racing calculations. He had stepped on a piece of glass on the floor as he tried to push himself away from the counter—the bottle? The wine bottle that he’d prodded it with what seems like eons ago must have fallen, he concluded, staring down at the array of glass shattered across his floor with dull fascination. He hadn’t even heard the crash. Blood from the gash in his foot oozed slowly across the tile, leaking into the cracks between. 

“Fuck,” he said dully to himself, still staring at the floor. All at once, his blank numbness to the situation vanished, and was replaced with anger. He yelled, “Fuck!” and swept an arm blindly at the counter, sending the small bag of pills flying into the sink. “What _fucking right_ —”

He wasn’t sure who he was mad at. Blake? Not really. Mostly, he was just mad at himself, for being so goddamn predictable. Juno Steel, eternal fuck up, staring down old vices and losing like the sucker he was. He banged his fist down—hard—against the countertop. Fuck this whole day, this whole shitty week, this whole _fucking joke of a life_ — He could see the stupid baggie of pills still sitting innocently in the stainless metal of his sink.

The fight vanished from him as the itch crawled back in under his skin. Pathetic. He fell to a crouch, gasping as the redistribution of his weight put more on his injured foot. Sitting against the tile, it felt cooler. He wasn’t sure if it was warmer standing or whether the sweat was a reaction to the craving. He looked around half-blind, for anything to use as a distraction. Anything at all. 

His eyes landed on his comms, halfway fallen from his work bag and onto the floor. Feeling pathetic, he crawled forward, away from the glass, and reached for it. 

He dialed blindly. 

“Do you know what time it is, Mistah Steel?” Her voice exploded from the receiver after less than a second. “Why I coulda already been long gone—I should be, you know, I always say, I need my beauty sleep—or did Franny say that? But you know, boss, it’s really after hours, so—”

Juno’s throat felt as dry as the uninhabited Martian desert. “Rita,” he managed a croak. 

“Mistah Steel?” Rita sounded immediately concerned. Juno felt choked with it. “Are you alright? Where are you?”

“Rita. I—” Juno wasn’t sure what to say. He felt suddenly short of breath, like there wasn’t enough air in the room. His vision was blackening around the edges, and his breath came in short pants. His chest felt like it was caving in, folding down over his lungs, squeezing his heart down with his ribs. His airway felt blocked by something heavy-- 

Through a tunnel, he could hear Rita’s voice on the other end of the comms. “—have you been stabbed? Kidnapped? _Killed_?! Never mind that Mistah Steel, I’ve got your comms’ location pinned—oh you’re at your place. That sure is a funny place to get kidnapped to, boss. Well, I’ll be there in a jiffy, just you wait. Rita’s comin’.” 

The call dropped, plunging Juno’s kitchen back into relative silence. His breaths were still coming short and heavy, rasping through his dry throat. The burning itch was in his hands, his arms, his legs, screaming at him to stand, to go to the sink—just a little—how much could a little hurt-- 

He stayed on the kitchen floor for an indeterminate amount of time, hands locked in his hair, pulling at the roots in a vain attempt to keep his hands anchored and to keep them from reaching. The cabinets were cool against his back but all he could feel was that crushing feeling in his chest and the itch in his veins. He pressed his head to the cabinet behind him, shutting his one good eye with all his might. 

“Mistah Steel?” Juno had rarely been so glad to hear Rita’s voice. He didn’t have time to wonder how she got into the apartment—had he given her a key?—before she was upon him. He looked up at her blearily, through a squinted eye. “What’re you--? Is that blood? Boss, boss, are you alright?” She stepped closer, hands fluttering anxiously and eyes darting about. With his squinted gaze, Juno could see her put some of the pieces of the puzzle together—the smashed bottle, the fallen comms, the blood on his foot. He managed a vague, jerky motion like a nod. 

“I don’t know if that’s so true, boss,” Rita said, as gentle as she ever got, crouching closer. “You’re holding awfully tight to your hair.” She reached out and Juno hated himself for flinching. Rita stilled immediately and dropped her hand. “Do you think you could try to unclench your fingers, though? You’re gonna have a nasty headache otherwise.”

Juno didn’t have time to be grateful that Rita was one of the only people who had known him long enough to understand without asking. He tried to focus on his fingers—pulling, the burning in his scalp—and slowly tried to uncurl them. They felt stiff, like he’d been holding his hair for hours, days, not minutes. He closed his eye again and tried to breathe. Rita’s voice played like a poorly tuned radio, in and out of his attention. 

“You got this, Mistah Steel,” Rita continued. “You’re almost there.” His fingers were completely uncurled, and his hands dropped, suddenly heavy. He opened his eye slowly. Rita smiled a small smile at him. “I’m gonna get a first aid kit.”

She disappeared momentarily, and Juno didn’t get the chance to count the seconds before she was back, damp washcloth and fresh bandage in hand. She took care of his foot quickly, efficiently. Yet another one of her underestimated skills, Juno thought vaguely, as she mumbled away about something. She took the shard of glass out with little fanfare and bandaged it—she chattered the whole while, but Juno didn’t have the focus to pay attention. 

The itch was mostly gone from his bones, for now. He was starting to come back to himself—feel a little shame, anyway, for the position she had found him in—when she returned from putting the stuff back in the bathroom.

She knelt next to him. “What happened?” Her voice was much softer than her usual rambled stories. Nothing to see here, Rita, he wanted to say, just Juno Steel, last laugh of the universe, disaster all by himself. No burglary, kidnapping, or con artist-slash-thief extraordinaire to fuck up his night—Juno managed it all on his own.

“Fucked up,” Juno mumbled instead, shutting his eyes again. “”m just fucked up. Useless, fuckin’--” he wasn’t sure where he was going with the thought, but it trailed off all on its own. The choked feeling was back in his throat.

Rita asked gently, “hey, boss, can I touch your hand?” Juno gave in with a jerky nod against the cabinet. Her hand was blessedly cool against his warm skin. He noted distractedly that she was taking his pulse, as her smaller palms slid into his. He held them like a lifeline. “Did you take anything, boss? Are you okay?”

Juno wished viciously that he had and that there were some excuse for his pitiable state—just drugs, he would have been able to tell her, welcome back to Juno circa seven years ago. Hey, remember his last relapse? Hadn’t that been fun, Rita? Well, now we can do the whole thing again, only without the stimulants, just the fucked-up detective and his miserable sob story. 

He shook his head. “Sink,” he muttered, eyes still shut, “didn’t take ‘em.” Her hands, which had been rubbing gentle circles into his palms with her thumbs, stilled against his. 

“Can I give you a hug, Mistah Steel?” Rita asked, and before he’d even finished nodding a second time, he found himself with an armful of assistant, holding him tight with all of her—surprising—strength. “I am so proud of you, boss,” she told him, clutching at the back of his shirt. He slowly lifted an arm to return the embrace and pat her on the back. “You’re just the bravest lady a soul ever did meet. I’m—that is-- Thank you—thank you for callin’ me.” 

“Who else,” Juno said lamely, voice rough and hating that it sounded honest instead of joking. “You’re the best around.”

Rita pulled away slightly and Juno could see tears in her eyes. She poked him in the chest with one finger. “An’ don’t you forget it,” she agreed with a watery smile. 

Juno shifted. His legs twinged when he tried to move them from the stiff, locked position he’d fallen into. Rita moved back to give him some space. He slowly flexed his fingers and rotated his ankles until he felt normal. Rita reappeared in his line of vision with a broom he hadn’t known that he owned. Carefully, she started sweeping, even as Juno got to his feet and stumbled to a seat on the couch, intending to rest a minute. 

“You don’t have to do that, Rita,” he told her quietly. “I’ll figure it out.”

Rita stopped and planted her hands on her hips. “Nuh uh, Mistah Steel. We are off work hours. You ain’t the boss of me now, boss.” 

Juno gladly would have protested further, but he was in no state to argue with Rita. “Don’t you want to know what happened?” He asked, though his eye had started to drift shut of its own volition. 

“Naw, boss,” Rita’s voice drifted over, “I figure it’s not a story that’s the sort that needs tellin’ again. I’ve seen the streams, anyway, and this is just like—”

He let her voice drift over him, and before he knew it, he had fallen asleep.

* * *

The coffee maker in his apartment was on when he woke up. Juno had a brief image of a silhouette, the smell of a unique cologne-- before he remembered the night before. His foot twinged as he shifted. There was a blanket over his torso, and a crick in his neck. He must have fallen asleep on the sofa. 

Rita hummed from the kitchen, a ditty that belonged to a washing machine commercial Juno had heard on the radio. He stumbled to his feet.

“Oh, Mistah Steel! You’re up!” She noticed him as soon as he got to the doorway. “I just put on the coffee.”

“And did my dishes?” Juno rasped, noting the empty counter. He cleared his throat. “Am I paying you overtime for this?” Rita raised an eyebrow at him. “Yeah, stupid question.” 

His eyes flitted across his kitchen—certainly tidier than the night before, without the dirty dishes, empty booze bottles, or various slips of paper that he usually left there. They landed on the sink—completely empty, not even last week’s coffee cup. And not--

Rita followed his gaze. “I tidied up a few things,” she said, studying him carefully. “Put out the trash and such. Hope that’s okay, boss.” 

Juno felt the pang in his chest, the one that screamed _no, that was mine, give it back, I need_ —but ignored it decisively. It was easier in the morning light. He cleared his throat again. “Yeah, thanks, Rita.”

She grinned, bright and pleased with herself. “You betcha, boss. Now how’s about that coffee, huh?”

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for joining me on this ride! If you've got a moment, I live for comments and would love to hear what you thought!!!
> 
> hit me up on tumblr [ @everythingsdifferentupsidedown ](https://everythingsdifferentupsidedown.tumblr.com)


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